M. Gigi Durham

On her book The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do about It

Cover Interview of December 05, 2008

In a nutshell

The Lolita Effect addresses the media sexualization of young girls. In the book, I draw a distinction between healthy, age-appropriate concepts of sexuality that should develop as children mature, and “sexualization,” the harmful and objectifying version of female sexuality that is propagated by the commercial media, fueled by marketing. The title itself refers to the set of myths about girls’ sexuality that circulate in the mainstream media and in our culture. These myths stand in sharp contrast to healthy, factual, progressive notions of sexuality that would be beneficial to girls and to society as a whole.

In the book, I identify the five main myths of sexuality at work in popular media targeted to teens and children and explain why they offer a distorted and unhealthy notion of sex to kids. The book is theoretically based, drawing on the work of the French scholars Roland Barthes and Guy Debord as well as on feminist scholarship, but it is written for a general audience. In a way, it is critical feminist media theory in the guise of a parenting manual. Each chapter ends with practical, realistic strategies that parents and other caring adults can use to talk to children and guide them through the rough straits of our media-saturated environment.

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016